I was recently introduced to the GoFlex Home Network Drive over the
holidays, and got to help set it up. Unfortunately, the device has a bug,
which is not fixed in the latest updates, that makes it impossible to
use static IP addresses.

Each time the device powers off and restarts, it sets itself to use DHCP.

The device runs Linux under the hood, and even exposes the SSH port,
but the accounts it uses are not obvious. And root is disabled.

To fix the device yourself, you will first need root access. The
easiest way is described in
this
wiki page. Basically:

Next, there is a bug in the logic of the /etc/init.d/oe-bootinit script's
ensure_firstbootnetwork() function. The entire function should probably
only run if the /etc/firstboot file exists, but there is an if/else
statement that only checks this for the first half of the if statement.
The else is where the DHCP overwrite happens.

By this point, though, your device has passed the first boot, so you
don't need this code anymore. I commented out the entire block of code,
and replaced it with something innocuous, just to avoid any shell issues
with empty functions:

echo do nothing > /dev/null

You'll want to be careful editing these files, since if you make a
typo that prevents network boot, you won't be able to login to fix it.

It seems that Seagate has
known about this issue since September, but
there were no software updates that fix this issue.
Using the web interface to check for updates, it claimed that the device
was up to date. You may want to take this into consideration when
making future purchasing decisions.